Human

The band's most divisive song by far, thanks to a chorus that asks, in flatly grammatical defiance, whether we are human or dancer — a phrase Flowers lifted from a Hunter S. Thompson line about a generation of dancers. The production, by Stuart Price, is pure synth-pop maximalism: shimmering arpeggios, a four-on-the-floor pulse, gated drums that gleam like chrome. It abandons the garage-rock scaffolding of the earlier records almost entirely, planting the band in the lineage of Pet Shop Boys and mid-period Depeche Mode. Flowers sings with a wide-open, almost devotional tone, less sneering than on Hot Fuss, more genuinely searching. The lyric is a string of gorgeous non-sequiturs — cutting the cord, a sign and a sinking feeling — that resolve into a real question about whether modern life has made us performers rather than people. It's a song that dresses existential dread in glitter and asks you to dance to it. Culturally it marked the moment the indie-rock cohort of 2004 stopped pretending it hated synthesizers. Best experienced at volume in a car at night, or in the last twenty minutes of a wedding reception when everyone has given up their dignity.